In Stagecraft in Euripides, first published in 1985, Professor Michael Halleran examines certain aspects of the dramaturgy of the most extensively preserved Attic tragedian. Although the ancient dramatic texts do not contain performance directions, they do imply stage actions. This work explores the ways Euripides utilises the latter to make a point: to underline some issue, to suggest a contrast, or to shift the focus of the drama. Specifically, Halleran investigates the rearrangement of characters on stage at the major structural junctures of the play: entrances and their announcements; preparation for and surprise in entrances; and dramatic connections between exits and entrances. Three plays from the same era - Herakles, Trojan Women and Ion - are discussed in greater detail to reveal the potential of this approach for illuminating Euripides' 'grammar of dramatic technique'. Stagecraft in Euripides will thus appeal to students of theatre and drama as well as classicists.

2020 Edition Set text for Eduqas GCSE 9-1 Drama exam Based on Maureen Dunbar's award-winning book and film Catherine: The Story of a Young Girl Who Died of Anorexia Nervosa. Catherine Dunbar died in 1984, after a seven-year battle against anorexia nervosa. She was just twenty-two. Mark Wheeller's potent documentary play uses the words from Catherine's diaries and also of those most closely involved and affected. This 2020 edition includes a foreword by the late Maureen Dunbar, unseen extra scenes and a reflection by Mark, on the astonishing journey of this widely studied play since its first performances, including one by OYT on the Olivier Stage of the Royal National Theatre. Suitable for: Key Stage 3/4, BTEC, GCSE Duration: 75 minutes approximately Cast: 6 female, 3 male, 22 female/male, or 3 female and 2 male with doubling. "This play reaches moments of almost unbearable intensity... naturalistic scenes flow seamlessly into sequences of highly stylised theatre... such potent theatre!" Vera Lustig, The Independent "Elegantly structured, highly informative, and imaginatively theatrical. There wasn't a dry eye in the house." Anne McFerran, Stage and Television Today

The fabulously wealthy Victorian gentleman Phileas Fogg wagers his life's fortune that he can circumnavigate the globe in just eighty days. Along with his hapless valet Passepartout, he sets out on a dazzling escapade that takes him from the misty alleys of London to the exotic subcontinent and on to the Wild West as they race against the clock on a dizzying succession of trains, steamers, a wind-propelled sledge and an elephant. Laura Eason's celebrated adaptation of Jules Verne's classic novel was seen at the New Vic Theatre, Stoke, and Manchester's Royal Exchange before receiving its London premiere at the St. James Theatre in 2015. Packing in more than fifty unforgettable characters, this imaginative version of Around the World in 80 Days was written for an ensemble cast of eight, but can be performed by a much larger cast - making it perfect for any theatre company or drama group looking for a high-spirited adventure.

'I could fly to New York and back every day for seven years and still not leave a carbon footprint as big as if I have a child. Ten thousand tonnes of CO2. That's the weight of the Eiffel Tower. I'd be giving birth to the Eiffel Tower.' In a time of global anxiety, terrorism, erratic weather and political unrest, a young couple want a child but are running out of time. If they over think it, they'll never do it. But if they rush, it could be a disaster.They want to have a child for the right reasons. Except, what exactly are the right reasons? And what will be the first to destruct - the planet or the relationship?

"McDowall masterfully plants ideas that grow until they explode into extraordinary shapes. Filthy humour breaks down into a cracked algorithm of letters and loss ... a play that will gnaw away at you. It's sci-fi - and theatre - at its best." The Stage Billions of miles from home, the lone research base on Pluto has lost contact with Earth. Unable to leave or send for help, the skeleton crew sit waiting. Waiting. Waiting long enough for time to start eating away at them. To lose all sense of it. To start seeing things in the dark outside. X premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 2016. This new Modern Classics edition features an introduction by Dr Cristina Delgado-Garcia.

Alice is becoming more and more forgetful. Her daughter Mandy is always on hand to help out, but is starting to feel the strain. One day a long-forgotten photograph stirs a memory and lures Alice back to the Crown Hotel in Blackpool, where she hopes for the chance to dance in the tower ballroom one last time. But when mother and daughter reach Blackpool, nothing is quite how Alice remembers, and she finds herself getting lost in the past. One Last Waltz is a beautifully written portrayal of a family coming to terms with complications caused by Alzheimer's disease. By turns sparkling with wit and heart-wrenching in its honesty, it's filled with vital and compassionate insight into the sufferings accompanying a disease that has blighted the landscape for so many.

More Bassey than Bhangra... Sonia's life has always been a bit of a double act, brought up as one half of a Shirley Bassey tribute act. Alongside her overbearing mother Gloria, she left a trail of sequins across the working men's clubs of East Anglia. Now she's divorced, battling through the middle-age jungle, wrangling unimpressed teenagers and navigating rocky friendships. But the arrival of her half-brother Naim brings a refreshed sense of belonging and cultural identity, and she begins to piece together the mosaic of her life. Can Sonia shake off the past, even with her ever-present mother keeping 'the show' on the road from beyond the grave? Glitterball is a play with live music, wry humour and a whole lotta sparkle. This edition was published to coincide with the first run produced by Rifco Theatre and Watford Palace Theatre at Watford Palace Theatre, in September 2022.

A time to learn. A time to rebel. A time to love. A time to burn. A group of teenagers - silenced and controlled by a censorious society - discovers a new world of feeling and freedom, with beautiful and devastating consequences. Inspired by German playwright Frank Wedekind's once-banned and groundbreaking play from 1891, Spring Awakening tells a story of adolescent anarchy, set to one of the best-loved musical scores of the twenty-first century. Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik's musical opened in New York City in 2006, and London in 2009, and won eight Tony Awards and four Olivier Awards, including both prizes for Best New Musical. This new edition of the complete book and lyrics - the first to be published in the UK - features four pages of colour photographs and exclusive bonus material by writers Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik, and members of the original Broadway and West End casts: Aneurin Barnard, Jonathan Groff, Evelyn Hoskins, Lea Michele and Iwan Rheon. It was published alongside the first London revival at the Almeida Theatre in 2021, directed by Rupert Goold, which won the 2022 Critics' Circle Award for Best Musical.

First published in 1985, The Subject of Tragedy takes the drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the starting point for an analysis of the differential identities of man and woman. Catherine Belsey charts, in a range of fictional and non-fictional texts, the production in the Renaissance of a meaning for subjectivity that is identifiably modern. The subject of liberal humanism - self-determining, free origin of language, choice and action - is highlighted as the product of a specific period in which man was the subject to which woman was related.

Ten strangers are summoned to a remote island. All that the guests have in common is a wicked past they're unwilling to reveal and a secret that will seal their fate. For each has been marked for murder. As the weather turns and the group is cut off from the mainland, the bloodbath begins and one by one they are brutally murdered in accordance with the lines of a sinister nursery rhyme. In writing the stage version of her most successful and darkest novels during the Second World War, Agatha Christie responded to the mood of the times by introducing a more positive ending. The play was a smash hit in the West End and on Broadway. The alternate version of the play's ending, drawn from the novel and using entirely Agatha Christie's own words, is now available in this updated edition

A sizzling drama of desire, avarice and deception set in the American Deep South, Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is published in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Big Daddy' Pollitt, the richest cotton planter in the Mississippi Delta, is about to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday. His two sons have returned home for the occasion: Gooper, his wife and children, Brick, an ageing football hero who has turned to drink, and his feisty wife Maggie. As the hot summer evening unfolds, the veneer of happy family life and Southern gentility gradually slips away as unpleasant truths emerge and greed, lies, jealousy and suppressed sexuality threaten to reach boiling point. Made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a masterly portrayal of family tensions and individuals trapped in prisons of their own making. Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi. When his father, a travelling salesman, moved with his family to St Louis some years later, both he and his sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evenings writing. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940 for his play Battle of Angels, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and 1955. Among his many other plays Penguin have published The Glass Menagerie (1944), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), The Night of the Iguana (1961), and Small Craft Warnings (1972). If you enjoyed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, you might like Williams's The Glass Menagerie, also published in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Tennessee Williams will live as long as drama itself ... he is, quite simply, indispensable' Peter Shaffer, author of Equus

The charming adventures of the Mama of an immigrant Norwegian family living in San Francisco. This bestselling book inspired the play, motion picture, and television series I Remember Mama.

Part One of the two-part Angels in America, Tony Kushner's epic drama set during the Reagan years in America - now recognised as one of the greatest plays of the twentieth century. Prior, visited by ghosts of his ancestors and abandoned by his lover after his diagnosis with AIDS, is wondering if he is still sane when the angels select him to be their prophet. Powerbroker Roy Cohn also has the virus - but he believes that only the powerless can have that particular illness, and so kicks back against his diagnosis. In the 'melting pot where nothing melted' of modern America, the nation's reaction to the sickness - and its sufferers - is laid bare. Millennium Approaches was premiered in May 1991 by the Eureka Theatre Company, San Francisco, directed by David Esbjornson. In London it was premiered in January 1992 in a National Theatre production at the Cottesloe Theatre, directed by Declan Donnellan. The play received many awards, including Best Play at the 1992 Evening Standard Awards, Best New Play at the 1992 Critics' Circle Awards, Best Play at the 1993 Tony Awards and the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

In Stagecraft in Euripides, first published in 1985, Professor Michael Halleran examines certain aspects of the dramaturgy of the most extensively preserved Attic tragedian. Although the ancient dramatic texts do not contain performance directions, they do imply stage actions. This work explores the ways Euripides utilises the latter to make a point: to underline some issue, to suggest a contrast, or to shift the focus of the drama. Specifically, Halleran investigates the rearrangement of characters on stage at the major structural junctures of the play: entrances and their announcements; preparation for and surprise in entrances; and dramatic connections between exits and entrances. Three plays from the same era - Herakles, Trojan Women and Ion - are discussed in greater detail to reveal the potential of this approach for illuminating Euripides' 'grammar of dramatic technique'. Stagecraft in Euripides will thus appeal to students of theatre and drama as well as classicists.

'I can change colours of objects by looking at them, hear the symphonies of household simplicities, taste the emotions in a room like sweet or bitter wine, and feel life's every heartbeat breaking through my ribcage in glorious technicolour. Just don't ask me to make eye contact.' An imaginative child's glorious fantasies - of dolphins and dragonflies, gingerbread houses and chocolate rivers - offer him an escape from hostile reality. When reality dictates he has to conform to the 'real world', he has to make a choice. Should he live authentically and risk stigma, or can he continue to hide? Based on real events from the perspective of the writer and the autistic community, JJ Green's A-Typical Rainbow is an uplifting play about the experience of growing up neurodivergent and queer in early 2000s Britain. It premiered at London's Turbine Theatre in June 2022, produced by Aria Entertainment, directed by Bronagh Lagan, and starring playwright JJ Green, who is a passionate advocate for autistic artists like himself. This edition includes the full text of the play along with contributions from the largely - and proudly - neurodivergent cast and creative team.

This edition is the prescribed text for the English Mastery Secondary programme. Hortense yearns for a new life away from rural Jamaica, Gilbert dreams of becoming a lawyer, and Queenie longs to escape her Lincolnshire roots. In these three intimately connected stories, hope and humanity meet stubborn reality, tracing the tangled history of Jamaica and Britain. Andrea Levy's epic novel Small Island, adapted for the stage by Helen Edmundson, journeys from Jamaica to Britain in 1948 - the year that HMT Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury. It premiered at the National Theatre, London, in April 2019, directed by Rufus Norris. 'Honest, skilful, thoughtful and important. This is Andrea Levy's big book' Guardian on Andrea Levy's Small Island

Written specifically for GCSE students by academics in the field, the Methuen Drama GCSE Student Editions provide in-depth explanatory material alongside the play texts frequently studied at Key Stage 4. Whether for use in the classroom or independent study, these editions offer a fully comprehensive and lightly glossed play text with accompanying notes specifically directed towards readers of this age, which unravel essential topics and challenge all students to delve further into literary analysis. A well established modern classic, Willy Russell's Blood Brothers tells the story of Mickey and Eddie, twins separated at birth who grow up to lead very opposite lives, but which constantly and inevitably intersect. In addition to some on-page explanatory notes and the play text, this edition contains sub-headed analyses of themes, characters, context and dramatic devices, as well as background information on the playwright. The Methuen Drama GCSE Student Editions never lose sight of their readership, and offer students the confidence to engage with the material, explore their own interpretations, and improve their understanding of the works.

You definitely want to f*ck her but you don't want to know her. You certainly don't want to stay for breakfast... Sarah Milton's new one-woman play tells the story of one woman's immediate response to a sexual assault, fueled by a toxic friendship and crisis of identity. Two best friends are heading out for the night. Our protagonist, known as 'She', is hoping to win over her crush - Isaac the bartender, at their favourite joint. That night, her best friend Trixie decides to invite a group of men home that she fancies, promoting She as her sexy, obtainable friend, to help seal the deal. But when She wakes up the next day, confused, sore, lying next to a man she doesn't recognise, she is forced to re-evaluate everything she thinks she knows about her friendships, identity and sexuality. This edition was published to coincide with the premiere at Park Theatre's Come What May Festival 2022. Do you remember the club, Amanda? Do you remember the club? In addition to 4, this play text also includesMilton's short spoken word piece The Night Tella which explores guilt, friendship and a night that should have ended in the chip shop. In these two complementary new pieces, Sarah Milton offers powerful, female led narratives with strong, complex characters.

The party ain't over yet! As long as that music keeps playing, I'll keep dancing! Raw, rude and raucous, Cherry Jezebel is a dazzling new drama. Hilarious and heartbreaking, it's a champagne blowout and the hangover from hell, a spin under the glitterball that lands in the gutter. The bass is pounding, the audience are cheering, and Cherry Brandy is blinking back tears. Tonight's the night she's finally recognised as the Queen she is, with the crown to prove it. Is this the triumphant moment she's always dreamed of? Behind the mascara, the wigs and the six-inch stiletto heels, all that glitters isn't gold. At least she's always got her best mate Heidi. But growing up queer in Liverpool is grim, and the queer family they've forged is about to slip through Cherry's nicotine-stained fingers. From the boudoirs to the bathrooms of Liverpool's gloriously gobby drag scene, Cherry Jezebel is a riot of lipstick and split lips, of bitching and bruises. It's a play that celebrates queerness while spilling the tea on the pain behind the polish.

A two-play dramatisation of Philip Pullman's extraordinary award-winning fantasy trilogy, first seen at the National Theatre. His Dark Materials takes us on a thrilling journey through worlds familiar and unknown. For Lyra and Will, its two central characters, it's a coming of age and a transforming spiritual experience. Their great quest demands a savage struggle against the most dangerous of enemies. They encounter fantastical creatures in parallel worlds - rebellious angels, soul-eating spectres, child-catching Gobblers and the armoured bears and witch-clans of the Arctic. Finally, before reaching, perhaps, the republic of heaven, they must visit the land of the dead. This adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, by Nicholas Wright, was first performed at the National Theatre in London in 2003.

These three great plays by one of the founding fathers of the theatre of the absurd, are alive and kicking with tragedy and humour, bleakness and farce. In Rhinoceros we are shown the innate brutality of people as everyone, except for Berenger, turn into clumsy, unthinking rhinoceroses. The Chairs depicts the futile struggle of two old people to convey the meaning of life to the rest of humanity, while The Lesson is a chilling, but anarchically funny drama of verbal domination. In these three 'antiplays' dream, nonsense and fantasy combine to create an unsettling, bizarre view of society.

"[Her] dialogue bristles with smart, eloquent talk...Ms. Ziegler's quietly lyrical language has a luminous beauty, and her talent for creating characters whose complicated depths are just visible on their surfaces is still more remarkable." (The New York Times) This second play collection from one of America's most successful theatre writers brings together four plays that offer differing perspectives on family and the human condition. Each play has enjoyed successful productions in cities across America, cementing Ziegler's position as one of the world's most exciting contemporary dramatists. The Wanderers: A funny, insightful, and mysterious new drama explores the hidden connections between seemingly disparate people, drawing audiences into an intriguing puzzle and a deeply sympathetic look at modern love. "As perfect a piece of theater as I've seen in many years. The script by Anna Ziegler is a revelation, touching on family truths, marriage, and personal histories...Go see this show. It's magnificent." (DC Theatre Scene) The Great Moment: A personal and poignant meditation on beginnings and endings, birth and age, and the moments of transition that mark our passage from life to death. "A reflection on family, love, life, expected loss, and the peculiarity of our relationship with time, The Great Moment blends moments of sweetness, sadness, nostalgia, delight, and humor to create a delightful evening of theater." (Seattle Pockets) Another Way Home: A funny, moving, and uplifting examination of what it means to be a family. "a laugh-packed serio-comedy that shoves family life under a microscope. The dialogue is ironic, sardonic, poignant, insightful and funny - with each sensation rapidly piling atop the next." (Marinscope) Actually: Investigates gender and race politics, our crippling desire to fit in, and the three sides to every story. "Gripping. Beautifully rendered and complex. Destined to trigger discussion." (LA Times)

"[Our Town] leaves us with a sense of blessing, and the unspoken but palpable command to achieve gratitude in what remains of our days on earth." -- The New Yorker Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of life in the mythical village of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire--an allegorical representation of all life--is an American classic. It is the simple story of a love affair that asks timeless questions about the meaning of love, life, and death. Our Town explores the relationship between two young neighbors, George Gibbs and Emily Webb, whose childhood friendship blossoms into romance, and then culminates in marriage. When Emily loses her life during childbirth, the circle of life portrayed in each of the three acts--childhood, adulthood, and death--is fully realized. Widely considered one of the greatest American plays of all time, Our Town debuted on Broadway in 1938 and continues to be performed daily on stages around the world. This special edition includes an afterword by Wilder's nephew, Tappan Wilder, with illuminating documentary material about the playwright and his most famous drama.